VIII.

THE EASILY BESETTING SIN.

"The sin which doth so easily beset us."-HEB. xii. 1.

THESE words occur at the close of the most brilliant rhetorical passage of the New Testament scripture. They form the point too of the most close, subtle, and profound argument which is to be met with even in the epistles of St. Paul. We constantly use them; no sentence of the Bible is more frequently on our lips. But we isolate them from their surroundings; we handle them as though they dealt with private matters of individual experience, the sins and follies to which each nature in its private propension is specially prone, rather than some broad human fault or infirmity which is the common sin and sorrow of mankind. We must read these words in connection with the great argument of which they form the culmination, and the splendid burst of eloquence which they close; or we shall miss their large and weighty meaning, and shall narrow to a private and partial experience what the writer intends to set forth as the easily besetting sin of mankind. The Epistle to the Hebrews is certainly one of the most important and profound books in the New Testament. Be it by Paul himself, as I believe, or be it by some Pauline man, it is in a measure the keystone of the arch of revelation, if the Apocalypse is its crown. The way in which, in the order of the Divine dispensations, the old grows into the new-the method by which, while so much once ordained by God goes apparently to wreck, to the eye of God and in the judgment of the far-sighted among men nothing Divine really perishes, no Divine promise fails of fulfil

ment, no Divine purpose or hope misses its fruit-is a subject of supreme importance, the consideration of which is needful to the completeness of Scripture, while it is full of suggestion as a key to the Divine ways, to the successive generations of mankind. Judaism has passed away in every respect in which it is stronger than a memory. It is essentially, though Jews live among us in Christendom by millions, a thing of the past; but the Epistle to the Hebrews, which unfolds. the method by which Judaism developed into Christi anity, is a living book in our Bibles, as full of vital interest for this present time as it was for the generation which watched with strange awe and wonder the tremendous overthrow of the elect nation, and saw the last fragments of the ritual and order of a Divinely established system swept along by the flood as wreck. There is profound instruction concerning the method of development in Christendom-how the Church grows, and strikes deeper root through the ages, while that which men call the Church and cling to suffers constant shocks, and is ever dropping piecemeal into decay and death-in this sketch of the philosophy of the most remarkable and startling development recorded in man's spiritual history. Whether Paul wrote it or not, it is the work of a man with Paul's grasp of intellect, and saturated with Paul's ideas both of Judaism and Christianity. One can hardly imagine Paul's life-work complete to his own mind without the production of such an essay as this. He alone grasped with perfect clearness the vital relation of the two dispensations; and we can well imagine with what intense earnestness this Hebrew of the Hebrews must have desired to justify his apostolic ministry to his countrymen and to mankind. Be this as it may, and these a priori judgments are of little worth in criticism, the book is one of large thoughts, views, and principles, reaching deep down to the foundations on which the edifice of man's spiritual faith and hope is built.

Let us try to realize some of the main difficulties of those to whom it was addressed, whose tormenting doubts and apprehensions it was intended to remove. They would be chiefly, I think, of two kinds; and they might be put into the shape of questions.

1. Can anything which is ordained of God be abrogated? 2. Can the Messiah, the kingly Son of David, be come, while those who follow Him are the world's outcasts, spoiled, persecuted, and slain?

The first is a standing difficulty with all the students of the mysteries of God, in all ages of the world. It pressed on the Hebrew Christians with peculiar force. They and their fathers for ages had believed that a certain visible system had been established on earth by God's own hand, and sustained by His almighty power. It seemed to them as if the very foundations of the universe were shaken, when their temple, their priesthood, their glorious Jerusalem, their beautiful fertile Palestine, vanished like a dream, and left them the beggars and outcasts of mankind.

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The second difficulty was equally grave. It touched men where they are ever most sensitive, in their individual experiences and hopes. Can the head of this Christian Church be the God-man, the glorious Being of whom our prophets prophesied, and of whose kingdom they had such brilliant visions, while its subjects are despised, hated, and down-trodden, and its princes are the scum and off-scouring of all things unto this day? We say that the Jews were pecting a splendid temporal kingdom, a visible reign of the Messiah in righteousness over a regenerate and exulting world. We say it with a touch of scorn. We may spare our scorn; Christendom is always dreaming of it too. It would be a wonderful thing if the Jews had not nourished some such expectations. All men have not faith. How many Christians understand Christianity better than the Jews understood the Judaism of their times? What is the Papacy but an endeavour to realize

this splendid and prosperous reign of Christ, of which Judaism dreamed? A rule of righteousness, peace, and goodwill, under the sceptre of Christ's immediate delegate and regent, is the vision which has haunted in all ages some of the ablest minds in Christendom; and the desire to realize this has been near the heart of some of the most desperate struggles which rent the civilised world throughout the middle age. We cannot wonder at their sad thoughts. We think the same when things much less visibly ordained of God are shattered and swept away as wrecks. The answer of the writer of this epistle to the question which was wrung out of the death agony of that nation and church was substantially this: God does not establish things, He plants seeds which grow. The principle of life in the seed is the principle of identity through the successive stages of the development of the organism. The body of man is one, though it changes form very visibly at successive eras, and though every particle of matter composing it is in constant flux, passing away from without, restored by the constructive force of the living principle within. Rise, he says, to a loftier and more comprehensive view of the Divine dispensations. See how the living principle of God's relation to you, to man, as Father and Redeemer, runs through all the dispensations, moulds the outward form of the Church according to the exigencies of the times, and is ever bringing forth new forms as the ages need. See how the germ which was planted before the law grew into the legal dispensation, and how when the leafage and fruitage of that dispensation grew old and withered, as things must grow old and perish, the living principle within took new and diviner form, suffered, as all divine things do, death and resurrection, and lived with a new and divine life in a new and regenerated world. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who

being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (Heb. i. 1-4.)

It ought not to be hard for us to understand and enter into the sore perplexities of the Hebrew believers when they found their ancestral kingdom uprooted, while no sign of the new Messiah's kingdom appeared, except the sway which a shameful cross was wielding over individual human hearts. Can this be the beginning of the kingdom? Can Christ be reigning there, and we His subjects here, the objects of His tenderest care and love, be so harried and tormented for our truth and righteousness as never men have been harried and tormented for lies and sins? Is it credible that God's sons in the world should be the world's outlaws; that those whom the hand of Omnipotence shields should be the helpless victims of the most puny foes? Are slaves and beggars the chief subjects of Messiah's kingdom? Does the fellowship of this new realm draw us into loving, tender communion with the saddest, the poorest, the most ignorant, the most wretched of mankind? Is the life of this new regenerate state a ceaseless struggle, a constant pain, with no issue but by the gate of death, whose apparitors may be a lion's jaws or a headsman's axe? Is the symbol of this splendid empire a cross? The answer to these questions is the text. The question is the sin which so easily besets humanity, you and me, quite as intensely as the Hebrews; and the cure for the sin, the answer to the question, is the faith which draws from the writer this splendid eulogy, a faith which scans the bounds of the invisible universe, and measures the range of the Divine thought from the height of the Divine throne. It is as though the writer had said, Looked at on the lower level, by the measures of the things seen and temporal, the lot is dark enough and sad enough: "If in this life only